In this episode of the podcast, a conversation with UAMN Curator of Birds, Kevin Winker, and Ornithology Collection Manager, Jack Withrow about the growth of this museum collection, the vastness of North and how little has been studied in detail, the time-tested value of room temperature preservation, the difference between live mounts and study skins…and so much more.
The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North, on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples.
In this episode of the podcast, a conversation with UAMN Curator of Birds, Kevin Winker, and Ornithology Collection Manager, Jack Withrow about the growth of this museum collection, the vastness of North and how little has been studied in detail, the time-tested value of room temperature preservation, the difference between live mounts and study skins…and so much more.
The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North, on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples.
Yeah, in general, people love birds, whether they consider themselves bird watchers or not. And the pandemic actually wound up dramatically increasing the ranks of birdwatchers throughout the US and North America because of the desirability of social distancing. And people got outside a lot more.
Roger Topp:Hello, and welcome to The More You Look, your behind the scenes journey into museum collections, research, exhibition, and public programming from Fairbanks, Alaska. I'm Roger Topp, Director of Exhibits, Design and Digital Media at the UA Museum of the North and host for today's episode. The closest I've come to studying birds was allowing parakeets free rein of a studio apartment, and trying to guess
what they might chew on next:books, a shelf, a grapefruit seedling. That is until far more recently. Peak COVID. I'm working remotely and walking down our road every morning to see what new tracks had been made in fresh snow--and to see if I could turn them into virtual casts of footprints and wing prints, 3d print them and display them at the museum. It
was backyard collecting:a Grouse, a Grosbeak, a chickadee, a grouse, a Northern Shrike capturing a Grosbeak and dragging it across the snow, a redpoll, a grouse. In this episode I speak with the UAMN Curator of Birds. Kevin Winker, and Ornithology Collection Manager, Jack Withrow about the growth of this museum collection, the vastness of the North, and how little has been studied in detail, the time tested value of room temperature preservation, the difference between live mountains and study skins, and so much more.
Kevin Winker:So, we have a real strong growth program, trying to lay in samples, both to cover the--well sort of--multiple dimensions of the collection. There's the the birds that we have, and that's the taxonomic space. There's geographic space, the geography that those birds occupy. And then there's also the temporal dimension. And if you're going to understand changes through time, you need samples through time. The importance is multi-dimensional, one to learn more about birds, of course, and birds up here specifically, although we can also learn a lot about Alaska birds where they winter. And that's an underdeveloped aspect of this collection, many collections, of non-breeding birds. And of course, non-breeding birds define Alaska's birds through most of the year. The other aspect of importance, I think, is increasingly so, is the environment the birds live in. And we can use these specimens to document the times and places that they lived in. And because we recognize that climate change is causing such environmental shifts at these latitudes, so fast, that aspect of the collections is going to become more and more important as we try to understand what the future holds when the future is the present relative to the past, which is now.
Roger Topp:And that's going to the same location multiple times,
Kevin Winker:well, as much as we can, although you know, just having just having samples from Alaska through time can tell us about this region, even if you don't have the ability to focus on a specific spot within that region. Of course, the more--the finer grain the geographic coverage is, through time, the finer scale the questions you can ask and have answered. But I think for me, at least, it's now that we have a decent handle on the avian diversity in the state, the wider societal potential, and what I mean is outside of Ornithology for the collection is to understand changes in the environment, and changes in those bird populations as well.
Roger Topp:Regarding growth of the collection, I know that when most times when I come downstairs--Jack's up most times, you're in the lab working on a bird, preparing a specimen. What kind of throughput is there, in terms of new birds, and I know we get a lot of samples from a single bird.
Jack Withrow:Well, we have 1,500 a year. And it's the same every year. It's planned growth, I guess, in that in a given year. At this point in time we prep, maybe half to a third of that. And the rest comes in from--it's already prepped or it's, you know, that percentage changes through time. But we we don't have without students the ability to hit 1,500 a year. So students are important in that aspect, in many others.
Roger Topp:As the plan, as a number you guys came up with--is that like, this is a target?
Kevin Winker:It's--we learned early on when I came, with experience, that that's about as much as we can do regularly without harming ourselves or underperforming. So, it's a target we can consistently hit. And that's the actual bottleneck about adding things to the collection. And it's just the human need to process every animal that comes in so that it's preserved. The data are preserved and catalogued, and it's properly housed, and 1,500 is relatively high. So globally, we're probably one of the fastest growing collections. But at the same time, we also cover a really large chunk of very important geography on the surface of the planet. We're the only collection this active at this latitude around the world. And we're not just at any place in the world, we're at the top of the Pacific Ocean. And that's a destination for birds to breed from both the Americas and from Asia, Eurasia. So we were the only collection sampling the entire East Asian flyway. And that gives us a lot of material that's of demand globally, the only fresh material. And I should point out that fresh material is important because we haven't in museums--we haven't been saving frozen tissues for very long. And that's the primary source of genetic and genomic material. So you really need fresh specimens to get the best quality genetics and genomic data out of them.
Roger Topp:And that material that you collect now, can be kept for decades.
Kevin Winker:Well so, freezing is a technology that's relatively recent in human history. It's relatively recent in museum history. And it's not very dependable. So museums are really strongly oriented for good reasons to preserving things at room temperature. They last longer. Everything that we can preserve at room temperature is literally good for centuries. Once we stabilize it and with with bird skins, we--once they're prepared with archival quality materials and set aside to dry. they are stable for a while. And we keep them in insect proof, light proof cabinets, light to keep fading from happening on the plumage and insect proof to prevent insects from eating them. Once they're housed like that, they're literally good for centuries.
Roger Topp:Gotcha. So this is what you're saying about the future. The future is present is that collecting specimens this year, literally fresh, means they can do studies on on those specimens this year?
Kevin Winker:Yes. So we can do--that's the cool thing about specimen-based ornithology. Once you have a bird in the hand, you not only have a wealth of data that you can tap right now, With the university--so there are students here not--one tomorrow, next week, but you have a wealth of data you can tap one year, 10 years, a century from now as well. And so it's that act of taking a sample from the environment and bringing it into the museum. Sitting at the lab table, as you said, Jack does every day, preparing specimens that--you're getting them set for archiving, and then we're also preserving all the data with them. So that, not only is it just an object that you're preserving for long term, it's all the data associated with that object. And then which I'm sure you'll get to, once it's computerized. We can link future data, develop from that specimen to that specimen. So I mentioned genetics and genomics. Every time we produce a genetic data set, or a genomic data set from a bird, we try to choose a bird that has a really comprehensive archived sample in the collection, the best quality sample we can get. So that we can tie that genetic and genomic data to that animal, that individual animal. And when we take our datasets and deposit them into national and international data repositories, they're linked by number to that object back here in the collection itself. And so it produces a network of data. And then also, we haven't talked about the multiple pieces that we preserve each bird that make it even more useful. We're not just preserving genetics We're not just preserving a skin. We're usually preserving skeletal material, an extra tissue sample, because freezing is not very dependable. The first freezers are mechanical and they break. And so we'd like to say that we can freeze things in perpetuity, but nobody's demonstrated that really yet out beyond a few decades. labor, two education, three their own research and future careers, a lot of potential connection to students, how many? How do they help you?
Jack Withrow:Well, they hit all three, or four of our sort of mission statements stuff, just as to what you just said. Coming from the labor side, that's great. But they also get invaluable training and hands-on experience. And that's all part and parcel of research education. Different parts of the museum hit different aspects of research education and collections in different ways.
Kevin Winker:Jack's absolutely right, the students are involved Being someone involved in the exhibits department here, I had in all phases. And one of our main missions here is not just to grow the collection, but also to use the collection and to train the next generation of collections-based biologists. And so, students come through, some of them come through just to learn how to be museum technicians. We often have undergraduate employees. And their experiences in handling specimens, handling data and learning complicated techniques, whether it's in the bird lab or in the molecular lab, is part of their portfolio, that training portfolio that they take forward into the into the larger world to be professional biologists. They also--graduate students do their own research. So all the students associated, all the graduate students associated with us are doing thesis-based research. And then that, by that I mean that, each of them will produce two or three thesis chapters, which eventually will be publications about research, that's usually in our case, centered on the collection in some way. And there are many, many, many types of questions that can be asked of the collection. And so we get a diversity of students who are interested in really a variety, a crazy variety of things that they might be able to do. And we figured out, we usually only give them the Go ahead, if it's likely that they can succeed in what they're proposing to do. a couple of questions about exhibits. And the first ones on But there are an endless number of questions that can be answered with a specimen basis, about birds and about the environments that those birds live in. the paper, just like one I just thought of just beforehand. As in when we talk about seeing birds on exhibit, as we've talked about many times, it's important to understand the difference between a mounted, aesthetically pleasing, you know, public-facing specimen, and what, on the other hand, is useful for research useful for archiving. And we've talked before about differences. And you mentioned the problems with light and putting valuable specimens on exhibit and having them bleached. Yes, under lights and that some of you could talk a little bit about that difference. And but but much more--like the second idea I had, which is like what, what you would like to see on exhibit? The main difference between birds that go into the research collection and birds on exhibit is the is the amount of effort and artistry put into a bird preserve for exhibit is wildly different than a bird put into the research collection. So the research collection bird is a construct, so you all the insides are out so they can't rot that's the case in both of them. But then, with the research specimen, we're using minimal stuffing, if you will, to get them preserved in a shape that makes them useful, but doesn't take up much space. And so a research bird specimen is laying on its back with its wings closed cotton eyeballs and a stick. Running through the interior from the base of the bill out to the in our case, the end of the tail that the feet are tied to or foot if is if we use the skeleton. Eyes closed on the back wings closed, as compact as it can be made so that it can lay in a shallow specimen tray with all of its fellows in a row and then another trade being right on top of that and so when you open the specimen cabinet, you simply see a series of shallow drawers or trays, each of which contains as many scientific specimens as we can fit on that. And so it's compact, it's got cotton eyeballs. And it's put away in this kind of an archival facility for both present and future use. And we don't pull those trays out very often. But when we do, we're pulling out either a specific birds or I should mention that we're a public institution and a lending facility. And museums are tight network research collections are a tight network globally. And so what once something's archived here, computerized, it's available for researchers anywhere. And so we're commonly sending out the pieces that we preserve to other researchers elsewhere, as well as using them internally. So it's a, it's a very dynamic archive, both with things going in, and things going out, on loan, and then coming back. Contrary to that exhibit pieces are elaborately posed, compared to scientific specimens, wonderful glass eyes, and they're a pleasure to see. As you can imagine, you've got one over your head right now, it looks just like a bird perched down on the tree branch in your yard. Those are hard to store compactly. And so those do not make good research specimens. They also don't have tags hanging from them. Every museum specimen that we preserve has a label that accompanies it, that gives the data about that bird. And that would that would be really ugly. If every if every exhibited specimen at a label hanging off of it.
Jack Withrow:They basically have different purposes. This mount is designed to catch your eye, look pretty, make you think about something, help you convey the science in this study skins, you know, they just have a different purpose. And you don't need series and series of mounted birds to convey something. They're all different species, you know, that menagerie type thing, and sampler could do that. But you don't generally need a series as we say as the same, or what looks like the same bird. So they have different purposes. For the most part, you could use even the they have cross purposes, I guess you could display research specimen to talk about research specimens and why we have this type and that type. But they they're different effectively, because they have different goals.
Roger Topp:And we're going to do that with the western coast cases, we had some drawers, so they can remain closed most of the time. And they'll have specimens on their backs.
Jack Withrow:So, it again comes back to the mission of--you got the education part, the research part, the outreach part. And both of those specimens, if you want to call them out in bird specimens.
Roger Topp:A number of years ago, I put in a sort of request for--if we come by a snowy owl specimen, I'd love to see one on exhibit, flying. And it sometimes takes a long time for one that to get one into the freezer. And when I asked for that, it's a lot more work to create it. Maybe it's more fun sometimes to do something different. But how does that
work with the you know:There's a specimen. It's a snowy owl now on exhibit upstairs. I'm guessing that tissue was taken for for the for the collection. So, is there--was used in some ways for research and can be used for research even though that was about a display.
Jack Withrow:Yeah, there's a bit of a judgment call and given the snowy owl that was probably salvaged and had probably minimal data. And, you know, it's just if someone really, really, really wanted when they could take one what's perfect data and making it a mount. You know, it's white feathers is probably not gonna fade too much. But like I said, that one does have tissues, it does have a good sample, probably I probably saved the skeleton I don't recall. So again, we're just balancing those sort of three big themes within the museum to come up with something that's mountable. We mounted it in house, which probably saved somewhere between 500 and a 1,000 bucks. Maybe it doesn't look perfect, but it looks good enough. And you know, yeah, probably takes three times as long to make a mountain versus a study skin. But it's that we're just if a lot of how many minutes do people spend looking at it? That's probably more far more now at this point than I ever spent on it. And now we have a store now that people look at I don't think there was one in the gallery before.
Roger Topp:There definitely wasn't. And you know, the Crested Auklet that's up by the bowhead--that's, I think people whostarted to notice that--it can go unnoticed for quite a while. But that's that was a that was a great little gift there for you to kind of put together that skeleton. And that would be a much more difficult project maybe, than just taking
Jack Withrow:I mean, I let the bugs do most of the work. And so this. it's not--it's articulated I suppose, but it's not every--in most of the cases, the joints in there are kept together by its own ligaments. There is some wires there, some support, but unlike the bowhead I think has it--just every single bone put together by wires and if not rebar or something similar. It It took some time again it takes that one probably took 10 times as long as it takes to make a skeleton which is what that would have turned into with had it not been put on display, but still much less time than the owl probably. And that's it it can engender much a bunch of different conversations--probably eating the same things as well. He was also taken by Alaska Natives subsistence hunters. It's a High Arctic endemic, or at least the north part of the Pacific endemic. I mean, there's lots of things you can talk about about it. It makes it nice juxtaposition with the whale since it's probably weights less than the smallest bone, the whole bird. So it's just a nice little thing that you see if you're paying attention.
Roger Topp:What else what else? What else would you love to see on exhibit? Let's let's it's getting any any thoughts.
Kevin Winker:I think, for me, the traveling birdwatcher is a person who we're not serving as well as we might given our location. And many people come to Alaska in the summer to see birds that they'll add to their life lists. Or if they just want to see really cool birds and don't even have a light list. Alaska is a very big place. Many of those birds that are unique to Alaska in North America hard to get to, and few bird watchers are going to see all the birds they like to see in one or two even 10 trips. And so if we could get some of those Alaska specialties up in the gallery, I think that would make a lot of mouths water.
Roger Topp:So a mounted bird would satisfy a bit of the itch.
Kevin Winker:Well, it's it gives you you get the chance to see what they look like and, and perhaps feel the pull that exotic animals give--everybody want likes to see exotic animals. That's why zoos are so popular. And yet I'm seeing them in the wild is hard. And so I realized that exhibit gallery isn't a zoo, but it's the closest thing we can have to Alaska specialty birds. And so you know, through time, I hope we might be able to get some up there. One thing I wanted to touch on, though, was directly we've indirectly addressed it one of the huge differences between exhibit specimens and research specimens is sample size. We've talked about Jack mentioned, you know, just one and the difference that can make and in Exhibit two, you rarely see mounted--I've forgotten the term. Well, dioramas in which you've got more than 5 or 10 of any kind of animal. You open up one of those specimen drawers and they're frequently 100, 150 of one species. And that is one of the things that makes a research collection really useful. And it's--in science, it's called sample size. And as an example, Alaska is huge. It has a lot of bird populations and many of those bird populations are quite different in plumage, and in size, and shape. And quantifying those differences rigorously requires good sample sizes. And for morphology, for example. We often say that, if you want to quantify the size of birds in a population, the best way to start is with 30 adult males and 30 adult females--and adults are bigger than than young of the year. And so if you think about that being the optimal morphological sample size by population, some people have done calculations about the world's birds, less than 1% of the world's birds are documented to that level of effectiveness. And so understanding differences in similarities between populations is one of the key purposes to which birds bird research collections are put. And yet the that fine scale of resolution is lacking. For most of the taxa that we're commonly collecting and adding to collections.
Jack Withrow:So if Kevin was talking about geographic, temporal, and species gaps, then once you get within a species, you got your sex differences, your age differences, your geographic location differences. So if you have 100 of one species, you're still knocking out you're still the reason you need more as you're rarely going to have a sample size that can robustly answer a question on say, you know, the differences and in all of the other variables that you might imagine, go into that age, sex time of year, for different for molds, if you were looking at molten birds or more continent or something like that terming it as molting basically, throughout the year, many birds just melt in the fall or fall and spring. But if you wanted to get a handle on that, with, you know, more than one or two birds, you know, here, you're going to need a lot of birds to be able to confidently have a large enough sample size, given whatever question someone might want to ask about it.
Roger Topp:It seems like something's really deceptive about the exhibits, because you're up there, and we have a lynx on exhibit. One, but yet, whether it's a good lynxor not a good lynx, since it's--
Kevin Winker:It's one. yeah.
Roger Topp:What does it mean?
Jack Withrow:If you were a Martian and you came down to earth and you saw one lynx, you would know absolutely jack shit about lynx. You wouldn't say-- Is that a freakish lynx? What if you got a melanistic lynx? You know, like, are they all look like that? Well, if you've got 10 of them lined up, you can say a little bit more. If you have 30 and 30 from lots of different places, you could say a lot.
Roger Topp:Add to which, if those mounts up there from any of the collections or low data mounts, you don't know much about that particular animal's age?
Kevin Winker:Yeah, we do tend to--we do tend to use a specimens of less scientific value for exhibits when whenever we can. But when you ask what we'd like upstairs, we'd also like those in the collection. And so what if we're ever going to go out and get things specifically for mounting, I would like to get 20 for the research collection and sacrifice one for exhibits. From this, it'd be a sacrifice from the science perspective. While it would be the mission for an exhibit-based specimen collecting effort. Jack mentioned the term salvage a lot of what we bring in is what we termed salvage that stuff that's found dead. So any way that a bird dies, and can be preserved, usually temporarily frozen. In the case of birds that come here, we collect them from throughout the state people know to route their dead birds here. And we tell them to, if they find something dead, put it in a plastic bag with a label that gives the date and location of where they picked it up. And we get we get a lot of salvage birds from window kills. Road kills. Cat kills. What are some other sources?
Jack Withrow:Bash program at airports?
Kevin Winker:Right. Yes. That's a big one. Yeah, keeping our skies safe from not sucking birds through jet engines, the US Department of Agriculture, Wildlife Services. Once a bird no longer can be frightened off the runway, they shoot it.
Jack Withrow:Agency projects, cast off people's studies on X, Y or Z where they're not going to use the whole animal, just looking at stomachs or something.
Kevin Winker:Yeah, and the salvage stream often contains things that don't have much data. And those are really a good source of things for education and exhibits, because they they're of less value in the scientific collection because they lack data.
Roger Topp:Let's talk a little bit about birders. I've never been overly fascinated with birds. And there's certainly a phenomenon with life listers and birders going long distances to see species, but it's also a general interest probably in birds in knowing what bird that is or the sound that sound I hear in that tree there. And so it seems that the research collection with this checklist especially isn't just serving researchers, is serving the lay public who are just interested in birds.
Kevin Winker:Very much so. And neither Jack nor I are technically birders or bird watchers, we both love to see birds and experience birds. I love to know what birds making that sound and the tree. Bird feeders out in the yard, watching birds. But neither of us--
Jack Withrow:We are defining birding relatively narrowly in that way. Birding is sort of someone who can just track of X number of birds in y area. But we I guess we do it. I do it professionally. I'm on the Alaska checklist committee. But that's more--my interest in that is more scientific than then ticking things, I guess. But then there could be people who I mean, there's everything from that from the casual observer of birds who does not keep a list, but it's curious what they are to someone who spends maybe even 10s of 1000s of dollars in a year and travels to far off places to put a name on a list for a given area. Presumably, be someone because it gives them edification in some way shape, or form for you know, 1000s of miles and spent a lot of money to see one bird for 30 seconds. And that satisfies them and they move on to the next thing.
Kevin Winker:And usually those are listers, people who are boosting their own lists, life list, North American list.
Roger Topp:It's usually a little brown bird that's just not in the right place?
Kevin Winker:It's all--there are many colors.
Jack Withrow:They are almost always situationally rare as opposed to truly rare. They are out of place. That's a human fascination with things that are out of place, and weird, and they want to see. Most of the birds that you list, quote, unquote, would be far easier to see somewhere else. But it's more fun if you see them in a place that's where they're not expected, or mean,. really the expected condition in birds is that they move around. So vagrant is an arguable term, extra-liminal, might be better, whatever you want to call it, though, it's eventually--they're gonna get around.
Kevin Winker:And we provide the scientific basis for the entire spectrum of bird appreciators to tell them what birds are officially recognized to occur in the state.
Roger Topp:Right, so when you mentioned the before that the the Bristle-thighed Curlew is a birder's bird, part of that--so it's a very--it's an it exists in a particular area. And so it's a birders destination to go to, go see this bird and it's in that habitat.
Jack Withrow:Sure, I mean, it's endemic as a breeding bird at least to Alaska. Winters in the South Pacific. So it's right there with Bar-tailed Godwit, a long distance migrant What do I mean by birder's bird? Yeah, it's not easy to see within North America unless you come to Alaska or on a beach in Hawaii or maybe I don't know how often they actually stop in Hawaii but yeah, it's not an easy bird see.
Roger Topp:And yet it's quite seeable if you make the attempt.
Jack Withrow:Yes. There are a lot of reasons, yeah, still may have to drive to, you know get to know them and drive 50 miles and walk five miles but --
Roger Topp:But that missing bird there that was seen in Dutch Harbor may not be there tomorrow when I arrive. We can almost expect the Curlew, if I get to the right place, the Curlew would be--
Jack Withrow:Kind of expensive effort, but yeah.
Kevin Winker:Yeah, and people go all the way to Nome to see Bristle-thighs and they don't get to see him for weather, timing, whatever it might be. A long trip.
Jack Withrow:But that's one on a long list of birds birds and again it's a birders bird if they want to see it. They get to
Kevin Winker:And if--and if for many of them if they've already define it, and if you see enough of those people to find something you go okay that's what they're interested in. And you can kind of quantify why that is and then around you can guess whether it's going to be exciting seen it if they've ticked that bird, what's next? That's yesterday's news. I've got to find one that I haven't seen. It's a very interesting hobby. But yeah, bird tourism is an important part of what makes Alaska attractive to a lot of visitors so and coming, circling back to exhibits, Yeah, we can do better to serve that sector with some some of these highly desirable birds on exhibit that we don't get our hands on very often to tell the truth.
Roger Topp:I'm more interested in birds and I lead on. We had a boreal owl show for the second time in two years. It was in our woodshed.
Jack Withrow:Got a cavity in there.
Roger Topp:No, t was just sitting there checking out the the area around with tons and tons of voles. But I got within 10 feet with my 800 millimeter lens. had to back up because it was too close. And it's just kind of staring at me-- but yeah, no, it's nice to see.
Jack Withrow:They're very approachable. Often anyway.
Roger Topp:He's got the elevation on you, he's not too scared. So, about maybe talk about there is and I know I talked to Kevin previously about the landscape and the gridded detail on the landscape. Is there a connection there between looking at the idea that, you know, you have a lot of collections in one place, because that's what people went through people live. Maybe they can actually talk about the breadth of the state, of geography. But the idea that the hotspots of collecting that happen naturally, because they're accessible, the right person goes there.
Kevin Winker:There are hotspots in the state that have been important throughout history because they're accessible, just as there are spots, Western Interior that are almost depauperate of specimens, because they're really hard to get to. Plus, there's probably not a lot that's super interesting there. But there are populations that haven't been sampled, of birds that occur here, for example. But we're not going to--I don't know any place that's that's been sampled in a grid like manner, evenly.
Jack Withrow:It'd probably be a waste of resources to do it that way.
Kevin Winker:It probably would be Yeah.
Jack Withrow:Depending on your question, I mean, but for what we do, it's complicated. Why the map looks the way it does when you look at numbers of specimens. And some of those are truly hotspots that we made a point of going to and some of them are a combination of accessibility and chance. And some of them are right when it comes right down to it. There are certainly places that are more important than others. But that's a constantly evolving kind of question. We get a bunch from here, that lay off on that place for a little while trying to focus efforts elsewhere. But that's it's a lot of happenstance that goes into that as well.
Kevin Winker:You remind me of something that I noticed when I first came up here, and we have not been able to rectify this yet. But that accident of accessibility has caused there to be a whole bunch of subspecies of birds. Subspecies are populations that are recognizable because of their phenotypic differences. So a slight difference in body size, a slight difference in plumage coloration. Those are often the bases for describing subspecies. Thesea are phenotypically, largely recognizable populations within a broader species. Anyway, there are a lot of subspecies of birds, described from Western Canada, Yukon, and from Eastern Alaska, different subspecies, and the only reason they're considered different subspecies is because the collectors from Canada got to the end to Canada and turned around and went the other way. And the collectors from Alaska went to Eastern Alaska and hit the border with Canada and turned back home. And so it's an artificial barrier, because there's nothing biologically to prevent the birds from Eastern or Western Canada, breeding happily with the birds of Eastern Alaska, and it's unlikely that many of those putative subspecies boundaries are valid, and we've not undertaken the effort that it would take to sample across that artificial barrier, that human caused international barrier to demonstrate that many of those taxa are--
Jack Withrow:Do you have an example of that?
Kevin Winker:I've forgotten, though I wrote a proposal about it once it wasn't funded. And then we couldn't get collecting permits for the Yukon. And so I just said, you know, I'm just not going to pursue that. Oh, one was Ralph Brownings Yellow Warblers.
Unknown:Over split anyways, right?
Kevin Winker:Yeah. But there were others there. And I realized when I started to see this weird boundary showing up that it's just the fact that there's an international border there and the collections when the collections never got assembled in one place to be able to compare them. Anyway, that's the kind of thing where a transect approach would be quite useful.
Roger Topp:Before we run out of time, maybe circling back to migrants. There must be real barriers to air travel.
Kevin Winker:You mean in the long term sense among migrants? Evolutionarily? breeding habitat? Yeah, that's going to be the driver. It turns
Roger Topp:Yeah. out that intercontinental migration is much rarer globally than within continent migration. And so populations tend to have more highly migratory taxa. Populations tend to split continentally, inter-continentally, within a continent, it's much harder for migrants to become isolated and to to differ. But we saw we saw historically, the Last Glacial Maximum caused some profound differences in migratory movements with that large sheet of ice covering much of North America, habitats that are currently wide open for boreal forest breeders, for example, were not present. And so those kinds of barriers existed. They were probably important--a barrier like that was probably important for the formation of the McKay's Bunting, as an example. They probably underwent some degree of isolation up here in the on the Bering Land Bridge in the unglaciated portion of Beringia. But it is harder to do so. For a migratory bird, the work that I've done suggests that geography isn't as much of a barrier as the change of seasons through latitude and time. And so an example I give in my class for ornithology is that Orange Crowned Warblers are probably on territory and breeding like crazy in California right now. But I look out the window and we still got two feet of snow on the ground. Our Orange Crowned Warblers aren't here. Where are they? They're hanging out in California, but they're not breeding. And so--and they're different subspecies of Orange Crowned Warbler is between
Kevin Winker:So, they're, what these migrants are trying to do Alaska and California. And so it's that barrier of where and when to nest that's probably preventing those populations from crossing exceptionally often. So allows them to differentiate a bit. So it's less geography than phenology. Progression of a breeding season across entire species range. So the Alaska Orange crowd, we're still waiting in California, are starting to migrate north. But there's no time for them to stop and breed and come and breed in Alaska. And they're adapted to an Alaska breeding season. And they're all--their gonads are still tiny and will be until they just before they arrive. That explain? is they're trying to maximize their reproductive success. And they're taking advantage of these resource blooms that occur. And we have a phenomenal resource bloom here in the high north with very long summer days. Very high summer productivity, and fewer parasites and predators probably also than--
Roger Topp:Sounds very behavioral, like Alaskans will vacation in Hawaii but not Florida.
Jack Withrow:The seasons change north to south, not east to west. So the migrants are gonna go up and down, if you will, on the globe. And that's why you have less east to west. It still happens. But it's rare, because Hawaii's closer, so we just go straight down as opposed to jogging. It's a long way, right? Because--why that pattern exists is because birds want to take the shortest route to spend the winter somewhere warm.
Kevin Winker:So, actually, that gets at some really weird stuff. They, they don't take the shortest route. They kind of follow ancestral patterns.
Jack Withrow:But if you go deep enough back in time, that's got to be part a part of that, whether they take a circuitous route, because there's a stopover site, or the winds happen do that. And that's kind of I'm talking to you in at a higher altitude.
Roger Topp:And will go out of our way for lunch here because it's usually well,
Kevin Winker:But here's, there's--there's some really weird stuff. Blackpoll Warblers from interior Alaska, they're going to winter in South America, they don't go straight to South America. They go all the way to the east coast of North America to do the freakin Maine, fatten up and cross the Atlantic Ocean to get down to South America instead of taking a reasonable route.
Jack Withrow:But that's still got them within you know, some bounds of longitude.
Kevin Winker:Boy, yeah, but they're, they're crossing the most of the continent. It's crazy. It's really weird. So there's some really strange routes in birds. Part of it's gonna be wind part of it's all that stuff.
Jack Withrow:Many of the other day go migrate, roughly north to south is is because of the seasons.
Kevin Winker:Yeah, but there, but there's a case in Swainsons Thrushes, or another one where you've got a phenomenal east west movement going on as well.
Jack Withrow:It's a tiny aspect of the north - south. I mean, it's like what 10% of the north south movement is a tight small relative to the north south, I would assume.
Kevin Winker:In Blackpolls. No, it's probably--it's probably pretty close to the same thing that--
Jack Withrow:I think we need a globe, but I doubt--
Roger Topp:Yeah, we need a string and a globe.
Kevin Winker:We want a globe. There are some super freakish avian migrations that don't make sense there. Because there's so many cases where they're not simply taking the shortest route and we can't see why.
Roger Topp:But we can assume there was a good reason at some point in time. They were obviously was a driver--
Kevin Winker:Yeah, one of the main one of the main hypotheses is the expansion of habitat, the direction that took and so
Roger Topp:The Geography there isn't a barrier. It's just more boreal forest is boreal forests from western Alaska to eastern Canada. And a lot of those--so one of the cool things about Alaska is that, you know, lower 48. You've got an eastern North American avifauna in a western North American avifauna. By the time you get up to Alaska, that becomes a north to south relationship with the birds here in Fairbanks being more closely associated with the eastern North American forest birds than with the Western. And then you go across the Alaska Range and of a guide. it's more Western than Eastern.
Kevin Winker:The mountains are a barrie,r and the mountains, the lack of mountains, or relative lack of mountains enable the eastern North American birds to colonize interior Alaska.
Roger Topp:Yeah, I like how you guys are facing in the direction this room that I am. And you you're definitely referring to maps on the wall somewhere above my head.
Kevin Winker:Yes. Yes. There's when I got three maps hanging on the wall. Only one is Pacific-centered, which is the way the world looks from a bird's perspective up here. It's an exciting place and an exciting time to be an ornithologist. Just generally, it is. Yeah.
Roger Topp:It's not just that we're hoping for spring at some point here.
Kevin Winker:No, no, it's exciting all winter too, because then we get to study birds in the cabinets, in the collection. So I'm running. I'm running thrush genomes on that computer right behind you right now.
Roger Topp:So, this is your pitch for more and more people to come and stud,y undergrads to learn, learn, take apart birds.
Kevin Winker:Well,we're gonna bring in a bunch of new grad students here as soon as well. It's a great time to be an ornithologist. It's great place to be here in Alaska studying birds, and we didn't touch on how important--I did touch on how important wintering areas are to Alaska birds. And Alaska birds winter on every continent. Elsewhere in North America, South America, Australia, Asia, even some make it to Europe in the way of--one species that winters every winter in Africa. So we're very connected in Alaska's avifauna. So and that's where we need to study a little bit more. What happens to these birds when they're not here? What are they exposed to? What are they a whole host of questions?
Roger Topp:Fantastic. well, thank you guys.
Kevin Winker:Thank you, Roger.
Roger Topp:Thank you to Kevin Winkler and Jack Withrow for the conversation and their enthusiasm for preparing birds both for study and display. My favorite mount on display at the museum is that of the Crested Auklet skeleton that swims alongside that of the Bowhead Whale in the main lobby. Though my favorite bird-related exhibit is that of a replica 3d printed lynx track in snow, bird-related because while I was photographing the track to make the exhibit model, one of the barnyard chickens walked by and put her footprint right across that of the cat. 'That'll work,' I said. The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, share, and rate the program. This helps other listeners discover more about not only the work of this museum, but quite possibly, other museums in their neighborhoods. The more you look, the more you find.